Sent on Saturday, September 14, 2013.

To:    nbcsportshelp@nbcunil.com

Hello

My name is Francis Allcorn an ex-pat from England and getting on a bit. I have been in this country for over 40 of those years. One of my greatest pleasures is to watch the English Premier League and I have done whenever possible.

When Fox Sports had the contract, the coverage was extremely good and at any given time, I was able to watch all 10 of the Premier games. If I did happen to miss any, there were always lots of re-runs through the week. I guess I got used to it and as with all good things, it came to an end when NBC was awarded the contract.

For starters, my cable/internet company, Time Warner was not on the list of providers which meant that I was not able to watch any games on my laptop although I could watch the 4 or 5 that were shown on the television. I resolved this issue by changing cable companies to ATT U-Verse which also cost money. Imagine my dismay when I discovered that this morning, there were 5 games on NBCSports/Extra/Live and they were all at the same time, 10:00 am. Now please tell me, what sort of service is this when I can only watch 1 of the 5 games. Why are they all shown at the same time? Is it not possible to spread them out so they are shown one after the other or at the very least, make them available via video through the week. To show them once with no repeats is doing the American Public a grave injustice and puts ardent soccer fans like me at a real disadvantage.

I tried to compensate and had my laptop showing one game with one of my video recorders taping that game. The quality of the video is bloody awful to say the least. I then had my Surface showing a different game and alongside of that, my I-Phone showing yet a third game. I tried to get a game to come up on my TV which has internet capabilities but was unable to get the video to open. I was going to film that with my other video recorder to watch later but obviously, was unable to do so.

As you can tell from this monologue, it is not for the want of trying. The bottom line is that as a company, you have not planned this whole thing very well and I am truly surprised that you were awarded the contract based on your method of making the games available. Amazing how money speaks as quite obviously, you have very little concern about your end product or to the viewers like me who like to watch these games. Luckily for me, I am fairly technically savvy but there are an awful lot of people who are not and you have succeeded in taking away from them, the ability to watch what for many of us, is the highlight of the week.

I would be willing to bet that you have probably received thousands of complaints from viewers like me very unhappy with the current scheme of things. I know we are stuck with it but I would petition you on behalf of all of those other people besides myself that you stagger the times so that not all of the games on NBCSports/Extra/Live are not all shown at the same time and also to make them available via video so that they can be viewed at a different time.

I am not expecting that you will even respond to this let alone make any changes but it would be nice.
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